man & nature # 65 ~ a new learning curve
Saturday, October 25, 2008 at 11:25PM 
Gasoline and Motor Oil • click to embiggenI've been messing around with making some BW prints from some of my files. The BWs are "conversions" from color files - is there any other way of picturing in BW in the digital age? If you shoot RAW, I don't think that there is.
Nevertheless, what I am discovering in the process of making "conversions" is that there are plenty of interesting options available when using the Calculations dialog box. It seems possible to achieve results that resemble those created with conventional BW film methods - things like shooting with a red filter to get dramatic dark skies and so on. In fact, like so much in the digital darkroom, it possible to get much more "fine-tuned" results - the equivalent of shooting with BW film and having lots and lots of filters in your bag.
But, of course, the "magic" of it all is that this can all be done after the fact of picturing. And, there are sooo many possibilities that it makes Adams' Zone System since like an very limited and very antiquated process from the 1940s. Oh, wait ... it is from the 1940s.
Reader Comments (5)
I'll be interested to where this leads; color seems so integral to your photographs. I'm curious why you're using calculations rather than the 'Black and White' adjustment which seem more flexible to me and has the advantage of working as an adjustment layer. Do Calculations offer an advantage I'm not aware of?
Mark,
calculation as well apply image give you a large choice of channel manipulation like substituting the red one with the green one if this better fits your aim. Oh by the way it works nice for colors too. A bare example is to apply image of the red channel to a duplicated layer of the background in darken mode and then put the layer in luminosity mode: this is for RGB color mode.
The interesting thing is that each photoshop color mode single channel gives you a nice set of filters.
I could not resist. Did not want to stole the Word from the Master :-D I apologize.
However I always suspected that the Master was quite able in digital darkroom manipulations, the best ones are the ones you did not notice.
Mark, you must be a mind reader. I was going to email you on your thoughts on this. My question is this, my wifes Nikon D40 shoots B&W and I was wondering do most people make color images and convert them or do they use the B&W setting (if availabe) on their camera?
Thanks Mauro, I understand how the calculations work--I've used it when working with 7-channel landsat images-- but I am curious why someone would choose it over the Black and White adjustment (which lets you mix channels in a fairly intuitive manner) or even the channel mixer which lets you set percentages of each channel.
Mark you can find some explanations (certainly better than mine) in "Dan Margulis" professional photoshop which has a chapeter on bw conversion using those methods. Channel surgery, for how i see it, is one of the only ways to add new information in a digital image.